Regulating Social Behaviour by Multimodal Public Signs: Semiotic Pragmatics of Prohibition

Abstract

Interaction in both institutional and everyday situations involves a range of resources. Apart from verbal means, social behaviour is regulated through various semiotic instruments that contribute to or specify verbally expressed meanings. While there is a vast body of scholarly studies focusing on multimodality in communication, the structure of multimodal texts needs refining. In this chapter, we draw upon public signs and notices to explore how different semiotic resources, such as words, fonts, frames, colours and images cooperate to produce the pragmatic effect of prohibition. We distinguish between the two groups of public signs with respect to the relation they bear to institutional discourse and the semiotic resources employed: public signs that retain the marks of official legal discourse and thus rely predominantly on verbal means; and naive regulators, which are deprived of legal markers and reiterate legal norms through multimodal resources, offering a ready-made version of a social norm. Our findings imply that multimodal resources allow for a combination of legal and commonsensical meanings in everyday interactions.